In my role in business development, I have an opportunity to talk directly with a number of stakeholders who are looking for help to modernize existing apps or build new ones to meet their business goals and increase pace of innovation. But given their existing investments in application frameworks, architecture and legacy code, they take a very cautionary approach when it comes to migrating apps to the cloud. They fully understand the benefits of moving their apps to the cloud and how that will increase speed of app delivery and in reducing costs for the long-term. In this blog, I have laid out clear and practical strategies to help with cloud migration.

First, let us consider the key question of app development before they are deployed in the cloud. To use the most modern trends in software development, it is best to go with a visual application development tool for quickly assembling apps using pre-built widgets, themes, layouts, business components and more. I would also highly recommend going with an API-first approach when building apps to enable omnichannel consumption of data and services. And lastly, when it comes time to deploy these apps, take one of the 3 cloud-first strategies that I have laid out here.

Cloud-native Strategy

With this strategy you are truly taking a Cloud-native approach. You not only assemble and build your apps in the cloud, but also do your testing, improvements, maintenance and deployment in the cloud. There is nothing on-premise with this approach

This strategy works beautifully if you are building new applications or enhancing applications where the data and services consumed by your apps are accessible in the cloud (and not behind firewalls) both during development and runtime

WaveMaker offers a SaaS offering for visual rapid application development and deployment. This platform allows for rapid prototyping, testing and iterating on your apps in an agile manner. The deployment is a PaaS offering build on Docker technology. WaveMaker SaaS is optimized for building and running applications in the cloud

Cloud-optimized Strategy

In this strategy, you are leveraging benefits of the cloud while having a complete control over data and services consumed by your apps running in the cloud

This strategy is preferred by bigger financial and insurance companies who are somewhat averse to running vendor tools inside their own data centers for security and compliance reasons

With this approach, you are running vendor development tools in a public or private cloud while you develop your apps and allow access to data and services via a secure network

WaveMaker Enterprise platform can be run inside a public or private cloud (virtual private cloud) for rapidly building applications. Once built, these apps can be deployed in your public or private cloud. Access to data is via a secure network and may reside in either your own data center or private clouds

Cloud-hosted Strategy

This is an hybrid approach for migrating apps to the cloud. In this strategy, you develop and test your application on-premise, but deploy those apps in the cloud

The apps build on-premise can be deployed to any private or public cloud and use any 3rd party web containers

WaveMaker Enterprise offering allows on-premise development of your applications. Since the apps are developed inside your firewall, there are no security and compliance issues. Deployment of apps happens in either your private or public cloud, in both cases access to data is via secure networks and residing in your own data center or private clouds

As you can see in all 3 strategies, you have migrated your apps to the cloud, which is a very big first step in modernizing your applications and making them omnichannel (accessible and responsive on both web and mobile devices). With these strategies, you are future-proofing your apps for changes in technology, devices, and most importantly increasing the speed of app delivery while reducing long-term total costs of building and maintaining applications.